In 1985, Nono sighted an inscription on a monastery wall in Toledo, Spain, which became the motto for his late compositions: “Travellers, there are no paths, you must walk”. Dreaming.
The concrete utopia of a radically new music has always been the centre of Luigi Nono’s theoretical work, where sound space is a conveyor of meaning. In the time of Nono’s music, consistently “nostalgic, distant, future”, the (perfectly audible) distance from all inertia, immobility and closure (not only musical) of our time, projects it into a perfect, ethical, totally utopian dimension. Thus, in La Lontananza, the violin score is distributed on different music stands: the soloist must walk around, following non-linear, non-established paths with no need for a fixed form.